Unexpected photographic subjects

click photo to enlarge
A camera of one sort or another is with me wherever I go. Too many lost shots have taught me the lesson that, when you don't have a camera a great shot will inevitably present itself. Or at least it will be great in your memory as are so many missed opportunities. Consequently, on a recent short walk around the Lincolnshire fields and lanes near where we live I carried a camera, this despite the fact that it was August, the sun was high in the sky, and the chances of a shot were slight. And, my caution paid off. I didn't get a great shot, but I got a couple that I didn't expect of a subject I had never considered.

Stacked by the edge of a field were large rolls of thermal netting, the sort that is put over young brassicas in March in order to raise the temperature two or three degrees, give the plants a quick start and the farmer an earlier crop and therefore a better price. The ends of a couple of rolls were spilling down the stack, their stains and folds making a gauze-like, diaphanous texture that I knew would be quite appealing when a section was isolated in the viewfinder frame. Mercifully the end of the rolls next to the footpath were in the shade rather than the searing sunlight so I had no hard contrast to deal with. I made a several exposures, trying to come up with a composition that offered a little interest in terms of shape, line and colour. These two are my best efforts; not great shots but images with soft, quiet interest, delicate textures and subtle colours. And all the better, from my point of view, in being an unusual subject captured on a day of low expectations.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Photo 1
Camera: Nikon D5300
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 42mm (63mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f8
Shutter Speed: 1/250 sec
ISO:100
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Contrast and simplicity

click photo to enlarge
Language, thought and understanding revels in opposites. It seems that we better understand and appreciate one quality by familiarity with its opposite. Can one know true happiness without having experienced sorrow? Isn't generosity more recognizable and better appreciated if we have seen greed? Perhaps part of being human is to learn from the bad as well as the good, and to appreciate the good all the more when we know something of the bad.

In photography opposites are useful qualities on which to build images. Our photographs can emphasise darkness or light, compositions can be static or dynamic, colours can be muted or loud, and so on. I was thinking about this in connection with my image above. It shows a part of two shrubs in the garden of a couple that I know. They were deliberately planted together for the contrast between the copper and the lime green leaves. When I saw them I knew that I could use the gardeners' contrast photographically, so I selected a point where the two bushed met and took this image. Contrast and uniformity (which might have been achieved, though with less interest, by photographing one or other of the shrubs) are two more opposites that can form the basis of photographs.

Looking at the shot again I suppose it exemplifies a further quality- simplicity (whose opposite is complexity). Painters, musicians, photographers, in fact all artists, have much to say about the value of simplicity. The English fashion designer, Norman Hartnell (1901-1979) disparaged it saying, "I despise simplicity. It is the negation of all that is beautiful." The French painter, Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863) was of a similar mind suggesting that "a taste for simplicity cannot endure for long." However, Leonardo da Vinci said, "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." As I've mentioned elsewhere in this blog the German architect, Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe (1886-1969) famously said "Less is more", to which the American architect, Robert Venturi (1925- ) replied, "Less is a bore". So, as far as my simple shot of contrasting leaves goes - is it "more" or "bore"?

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 39mm (78mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/50
ISO: 200
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Thinking about colours

click photo to enlarge
Photography, particularly the digital variety makes you much more sensitive to colour. The other day I was walking with my wife when I stopped and pointed out how improbably blue the sky looked directly above us. It was the sort of deep, strong blue that, if you saw it in a photograph, you would think had been enhanced in Photoshop. Indicating the sky nearer the horizon my wife remarked on its strong turquoise colour. That too would have looked quite unnatural in a photograph.

Why is it that, sometimes, we can't quite believe our eyes? It's perhaps because, since the second half of the twentieth century, we've been subjected to "colour photography overload". Moreover, most of the still and moving images we see have been processed and moderated by people who make the colour of images gravitate towards the sterotypical. So, a blue sky is summer blue, a tropical sea is blue-green, northern hemisphere grass is towards the yellow end of green, and snow is "snow-white". We've become used to advertisers turning up the colour saturation to give a hyper-real effect, and that's something we still notice. But when a "natural" scene is presented to us we don't see the more insidious tilt of colour towards a notional "norm". Consequently, we're sometimes surprised, as I was the other day, by the real colours of the world.

The photograph above presents colours pretty close to how I saw them as I descended the hills above Slaidburn, Lancashire, at the end of the day. I pointed a long focal length lens fairly close to the point where the sun was disappearing, and captured the graduated colours of the receding lines of hills, framing them between the blackness of the near wall and field below, and the dark, brooding clouds above. It all looks a bit improbable doesn't it!

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 150mm (300mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/320
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On